Big Data, Big Goals
New center combs medical records for answers.
Neil Sarkar and Liz Chen are the first appointees in the Section on Translational Medicine.
The Brown Center for Biomedical Informatics (BCBI), one of the horizontally integrated research teams, launched this summer with the recruitment of two of the country’s best bioinformaticists.
Neil Sarkar, PhD, and Elizabeth Chen, PhD, bring the science of “big data” to Brown, which is vitally important for biomedical and many other areas of research. The electronic health record and other searchable databases promise to deliver new sources of insight into the practice of medicine and public health. They will establish a cohort of experts who will work with faculty from across Brown and its affiliated hospitals to mine these data and analyze their significance.
Sarkar, assistant professor of medical science and of health services, policy, and practice, is BCBI’s first director. He says Rhode Island strikes him as a particularly good place to do this work, because its major hospital systems are affiliated with Brown and have largely coalesced around implementing electronic health record systems that promise compatibility.
“We want the new Center for Biomedical Informatics to become an epicenter for next-generation informatics research and really capitalize on the unique opportunity we have in Rhode Island as well as the unique relationships the University has with the hospitals,” Sarkar says. “The timing is just right. If we can’t do it here, then the rest of the country is in deep trouble.”
Sarkar came to Brown from the University of Vermont, where for the previous six years he was director of biomedical informatics at the Center for Clinical and Translational Science. He studied the deep evolutionary history of an
Alzheimer’s disease-associated gene, developed a patent pending system for abstracting data from medical records, developed new courses on biomedical informatics, and edited a textbook on foundational methods in the field.
Elizabeth Chen, assistant professor of medical science and of health services, policy, and practice, is the center’s associate director. She too had spent six years teaching and conducting research at the University of Vermont. Throughout that time, Chen contributed to the progress in which health care systems have increasingly captured useful data, and electronic systems have become more influential in how doctors, nurses, and insurers deliver care.
“What we want to do here as part of informatics training is talk about the history, that so much has been done in the past,” Chen says. “Many people think this is a new field, but it’s been around since the 1950s.”
As part of the Brown Institute for Translational Science, BCBI will emphasize three areas: basic research (translational bioinformatics), clinical care (clinical informatics), and public health (public health informatics).
For example, one of Chen’s projects, a collaboration with the University of Minnesota and the University of Vermont, involves developing computational methods to mine electronic health record data that yield knowledge about how social, behavioral, and familial factors affect disease.
